The Old Countess (Sedgwick)/Chapter 1
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YOU are an artist, Monsieur?'
Graham raised his eyes from his canvas and saw an old lady standing in the mountain-path beside him: gloomy, unresponsive eyes they were, and they did not soften for her; yet as he replied, 'I try to be,' they remained fixed upon her; for she was a surprising apparition.
Against the blue autumnal sky it was a Goya she made him think of; festive and sinister with her black ribbons and laces, her pallid, painted face and great owl-like eyes. She leaned, witch-like, on an ebony stick, and a broad hat, edged with lace, was tied, from beneath the brim, under her chin. Blue, black, sallow-white; in colour and design the picture of her was wonderful; and her eyes were wonderful; so old, yet so living and liquid; one iris half veiled by a piteous droop of the eyelid.
Graham continued to gaze at her, noting further that, though stately, she was frayed and almost dingy; her black kid boot gaped at the ankle where a button lacked and the laces at her wrist were tattered. She was so old that she might, in youth, have been a beauty of the Second Empire, with fan and wreath and crinoline, among satin upholstery and gilded consoles; yet that she was still susceptible to male attention was hade evident to him by the faintly provocative smile that hovered on her lips.
'You have made it very menacing,' she now remarked.
Her eyes were on him; his painting, he saw, was a mere pretext; yet she must have looked at it, and pretty carefully, before addressing him, for such a comment, from an old lady of the Second Empire, showed discernment.
'Menacing? What do you mean by that?' he questioned. He remained seated, mannerlessly enough; and he looked away from her to his picture, and then out over the majestic spaces of sky and cliff and river. Perched high as they were on the precipitous hillside, it was also against the sky that the old lady saw him, and she might well divine that when he looked at the landscape he forgot her.
Richard Graham was admirably handsome. The modelling of his brows and eyelids was Napoleonic and something also in the folded, ironic melancholy of his lips, his cold and brooding aspect; but his face showed no further Latin subtleties, and his rough, dark locks, short but ample nose, broad irises and powerful throat, gave to his head, in certain attitudes, a look of Robert Burns. He wore exceedingly well-cut coat and trousers of thin grey homespun; a white silk shirt; blue socks; blue silk handkerchief, and sleeve-links of flat gold;—on all of which details the old lady's eyes rested, successively and with an almost passionate attention. His demeanour was that of an artist, but his dress that of a man of fashion.
'To analyse a menace is difficult, is it not?' she said, as he cast his dark glance again upon her. 'Your sky is blue; it is full of sunlight; yet it is a tragic sky.'
'I always feel the sky in France rather tragic,' said Graham. 'It seems to relegate us; to have no use for us; none of the complicity that one feels in our caressing English skies.'
'Ah; I thought you English—though your French is so excellent.—An English artist who prefers to paint France rather than his own country. Bien,' the old lady smiled. Her smile drew her drooping lid still lower; and her front teeth, still beautiful, though set in cavernous darkness, lent it a certain pathos. 'Perhaps that is what I felt in your picture. It relegates us. And not only its sky. Your very river is merciless.—Though indeed one does not expect mercy from a great river such as our Dordogne.'
'It's marvellous,' said Graham, gazing again before him. It was. He never recovered from the shock of splendour each seeing of it brought. Winding in majesty between its vast grey cliffs, its wooded gorges, it was to the earth what an eagle is to the sky; a presence; a power; possessing what encompasses it.
The old lady recalled his gaze. 'And it can be merciless indeed. During the years that I have lived here I have seen three inundations. Corpses have rolled upon its flood.'
'Corpses? Really?' Graham laughed a little, looking up at her. She was probably a romancing old lady and the quality went with something meretricious he felt in her voice, dulcetly, beautifully as that enshrined her perfect French. It went with the Second Empire tradition, too, this evocation of swollen tides and helpless, livid forms; a poem by Victor Hugo; a picture by Géricault. 'Why didn't they get out of the way?'
'Ah, you do not know the force and fury of our great rivers when they are unchained by spring among the mountains. They can, suddenly, resistlessly, sweep all before them. They are, in that, like our French nation, led by a Napoleon. My maternal grandfather was one of Napoleon's marshals. We are of plebeian blood on my mother's side; but I think I am prouder of that soldier of fortune than of my crusading ancestors.—You fought in our great war, Monsieur?'
'Yes; I fought,' said Graham, amused. Something in her tone, slightly resentful perhaps of his incredulity and lightness, implied that it had been a privilege to fight for the France that Napoleon fought for, and to claim the war, the victory, as France's alone.
The old lady was silent for a moment, leaning on her stick.
'It's all to the good—your sweeping everything before you—as long as you don't wreck things, isn't it,' said Graham, and though he spoke kindly he was beginning to wish that she would move on. This wonderful French light enveloped the landscape like an incantation; but it was October; the days were getting short; it would change if they went on talking too long.
'You are staying at our little Buissac, Monsieur?' asked the old lady. She must guess that he wanted to go on painting; but she could not, yet, he felt, bring herself to leave him.
'Only for a week. We are on our way South.'
'You are not alone?'
'My wife is with me.'
'She, also, is an artist?'
'Far from it.' Graham smiled a little, streaking a tentative colour on his palette.
'She has other occupations while you paint?'
'She's fond of motoring. She's probably scouring the country at this moment.' Graham laid on his colour.
'It is a wild, a desolate country for a young woman to venture far afield in. You do not fear for her?'
'Fear for Jill!' Graham laughed. 'She went through the war, too. She drove an ambulance in the firing line most of the time. The Dordogne isn't likely to frighten her after that.' He looked up at the old lady—'May I bring her to see you one day before we go? I should like to go on talking;—but not now.'
The old lady seemed for a moment arrested by this suggestion, and her young man's casual, kindly tone showed her that, if not unaware of convention, he was at all events entirely indifferent to it. But her surprise was untouched by displeasure. Her smile, on the contrary, betrayed delight, a delight that wreathed itself in graciousness. 'I shall be most charmed to receive you. Come any day you please and you will find me waiting for you with a cup of tea; and it will be a cup of real tea, and at the proper time,' she smiled, 'though I, myself, from long seclusion, have lapsed into the habits of the province. I dine at midday, sup at dusk, and go to bed with the birds;—a sad existence, is it not, for a Parisienne?'
'That's all right, then,' said Graham. 'We'll come at tea-time. And where are we to come? And whom are we to ask for?'
'You must ask for the comtesse de Lamouderie; at the Manoir;—anyone will direct you.—It is down there I live;—beyond Buissac; beyond the cemetery; in the midst of the chestnut forest. A road leads up from the grande route. I am afraid it is in terrible disrepair; your car could never attempt it. But it is not far. You could come on foot.'
'If you can get as far as this—I think we certainly can!' laughed Graham. 'And what about your Do you feel it safe to wander about the country by yourself?' He had risen in farewell and doffed his hat.
'Oh, I!' the old lady laughed bitterly. 'There are no dangers where I am concerned. I ceased to be a woman many years ago.'
This, to Graham's Anglo-Saxon ears, was a piece of information as unexpected as it was unnecessary. He ignored it. 'You might break your leg, you know. You might meet a robber.—Well, au revoir.'
'I have nothing to be robbed of, as you see.' The old lady opened her arms and displayed her ancient attire. 'I am a scarecrow. And if a dead scarecrow is found one day on a mountain-path—well, I should prefer that, to tell the truth, to holy water and holy oil and all the lugubrious paraphernalia of a deathbed.'
'I agree with you! I should too,' said Graham. Their dark eyes dwelt on each other for a moment. Something passed between them. He did not think he liked the old lady, but a smouldering ember of recklessness, ruthlessness, perhaps, looked out at him from her eyes and his own dark fires answered it. 'Don't die in the mountain-path till we meet again,' he said.
It was comical, pitiful, he reflected, after she had left him, to remember how the Second Empire glance had answered this final sally: a glance arch, triumphant. He had delighted her; enraptured her. Poor old creature. She was ravenously lonely.